Richard Bradbury (emeritus, University of Exeter): “McKay and the Literary Avant-Garde in the Twenties”
Claude McKay’s rise among the rise and fall of modernists reputations. The consequences and implications of this, for the academy, for us, and for the world beyond.
Brooks Hefner (James Madison University) and Gary Holcomb (Ohio University): “Claude McKay’s Letters in Exile: A Presentation
As momentous as McKay’s poetry and fiction are, it’s tempting to see his letters as potentially the most important piece of his literary legacy. As his pioneering biographer, Wayne F. Cooper, stated in a landmark 1973 collection of the Harlem Renaissance author’s work: “Of all McKay’s unpublished material, his letters are by far the most important, from both a literary and historical point of view. He was an excellent letter writer, and necessity forced him to write many. A complete edition of his letters should someday reveal one of the great stories in Negro American literary history.” We are thrilled to be bringing a significant portion of McKay’s letters into publication. At the very least, McKay’s letters in exile are an essential companion – in fact, the key – to his most revolutionary writings, from the groundbreaking sonnets he wrote after he left Jamaica through his trailblazing novels and short fiction and into his extraordinary memoirs and journalism. McKay’s correspondence displays the arc of the author’s evolving aesthetic and his restless need to move forward, geographically and artistically.
Eileen Julien (Indiana University): “Meeting-Up: Nomads and Cosmopolitans in Marseilles”
I approach Banjo, A Story Without a Plot, as an exemplary commentary on “meeting-up,” as Banjo puts it, through three dimensions of the narrative. The novel is moreover a veritable goldmine on the question of representation and identity. This question in its nuances and ramifications is well summed up in my view by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic (1933). Gilroy writesthat: “where racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourses orchestrate political relationships so that these identities appear to be mutually exclusive, occupying the space between them or trying to demonstrate their continuity has been viewed as a provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination” (1). The novel demonstrates this on innumerable occasions.
Louise Kane (University of Florida): “Transmediterranean Trajectories: McKay, Morocco, and Marseille”
This paper explores McKay’s global wanderings in two contexts: his transmeditterranean travels, and the representation of these travels in his poetry. From Marseille to Morocco, Barcelona to Monaco, the mid 1920s and 30s saw McKay traverse the Mediterranean with an ease and confidence that belied the complexities of the personal, financial, and health-related concerns that troubled him during this period. Much attention has been paid to McKay’s plentiful and varied contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, and also to the ways his Mediterranean travels influenced novels like Banjo. This paper aims instead to explore how McKay’s lesser-studied poems—particularly those he contributed to periodicals and several belonging to his then unpublished “Cities” poetry collection—show how, in the 1920s and 30s, McKay’s work evolved and embraced increasingly disparate contact points and global trajectories. Whilst some of the “Cities” poems—“Marrakesh” or “Barcelona,” for example—show how McKay’s Mediterranean sojourns clearly impacted his work, it is also interesting to look at the transnational networks McKay forged through publishing poems in American periodicals while living in the Med. Many of these poems reflect on his former lives in Jamaica or America, or the trip he took to Russia in 1922-3; the final part of the paper considers how the time McKay spent in places like Marseilles, Morocco, and even Moscow stimulated these reflections and saw him set up unconscious comparisons between the various geographical spaces in which he spent his time.
Céline Régnard (AMU, TeleMME): “Marseille ville-monde dans l’entre-deux-guerres”
Dans quel contexte Claude McKay a-t-il vécu à Marseille et trouvé l’inspiration pour écrire son roman Banjo? Telle est la question à laquelle cette communication tâchera de répondre. On évoquera tout d’abord la multiplicité des populations vivant à Marseille dans les années 1920 et 1930. Après la Première Guerre mondiale, la ville-port devient véritablement une ville-monde sous les effets conjugués de l’arrivée de populations étrangères d’origine plus lointaines, de l’expansion du trafic maritime, du dynamisme du commerce et de l’industrie et des liens économiques avec l’Empire colonial, et des effets sociaux et culturels de la Grande guerre. On s’attachera également à comprendre comment ce cosmopolitisme a été perçu à l’époque. Si les descriptions laudatives de ce brassage ne manquent pas, certaines représentations sont très ambiguës, pour ne pas dire dépréciatives ou péjoratives. La ville-monde dérange, notamment à partir des années 1930, alors que la montée des nationalismes provoque un repli sur l’identité nationale. Ainsi, il s’agira de restituer l’oeuvre de McKay dans son contexte social, économique, politique et culturel
Céline Mansanti (Université Picardie Jules-Verne): “Primo-publication et réception des œuvres de Claude McKay en France (1924-1934)”
Although McKay lived several years in Marseilles, wrote about his time there, and – unlike other Harlem Renaissance writers – had three novels translated into French not long after their first publication in English, the translation and reception of his work in France has gathered little critical attention. However, following McKay’s initial introduction into the French cultural landscape by a group of early mediators including Eugene Jolas, Léon Bazalgette and Régis Michaud (from 1924 to 1929), the French translation of Banjo, Harlem and Banana Bottom (in 1931, 1932, and 1934, respectively) triggered a lot of reactions across the French press of the time, informing us about McKay’s early reception in France. Whereas McKay’s work interested the « mainstream » general information press across the political spectrum, it was largely disregarded by the literary periodicals, specifically those addressing the more restricted, elite audiences. Unlike other Anglo-American writers who were also noticed for their unusual sense of composition, McKay was not perceived by the French critique of the time as a subversive, avant-garde author. Among the aspects of his life and work that did attract the media’s attention were his cosmopolitan journey throughout the world, his rich social and professional background, as well as the political themes of his novels and his experience as an African-American man, at a time when the life of Black people in the United States was of particular concern to the French public opinion. The analysis of these press articles also throws light on the racism of interwar France, sometimes made worse by a self-satisfied appreciation of the treatment of Black people in France fraught with anti-Americanism. On a more positive note, these press articles are also characterized by their blatant, didactic effort to provide French audiences with numerous early opportunities to discover the Harlem Renaissance, and more specifically McKay’s writing, quickly and widely perceived as singular and powerful.
Emmanuel Parent (Université de Rennes 2) : « Shake That Thing de Papa Charlie Jackson »
Enregistré en 1925 par la firme Paramount, « Shake that thing », composé et interprété au banjo 6 cordes par le musicien Papa Charlie Jackson, est le titre emblématique de l’univers musical du roman Banjo de Claude McKay (1929). Comme l’avait remarqué Brent Edwards (2003: 190), cette bande-son joue un rôle bien précis dans l’économie du roman: celui de venir incarner et de faire exister une communauté sans frontière qui s’est rassemblée sur le vieux port de Marseille. Certes, la présence d’un morceau américain qui fait swinguer les soirées du quartier réservé de la Fosse au milieu des années 1920 atteste déjà de la capacité de la musique à traverser les frontières des États-Nations. La lecture du roman montre que cette volatilité est portée par une industrie du disque naissante tout autant que par une culture orale véhiculée par les migrations des Noirs de la diaspora après la Première Guerre mondiale. Mais dans cette communication, nous tâcherons en outre de montrer, au travers d’une analyse musicologique, que la question de la traversée, qu’elle soit géographique, de genre ou de race, est au cœur même de la composition et de l’interprétation de ce morceau et de son riff dévastateur : « Oh, shake that thing! ».
Claudine Raynaud (emerita, Université Montpellier III): “Passage de McKay à The Liberator et The Workers’ Dreadnought”
Building on Winston James’s (2021, 2022) and Stephanie Brown’s (2019) research, I will attempt to trace McKay’s “passings,” i.e., his transition from the United States to Great Britain, and back, as a journalist at The Workers’ Dreadnought and The Liberator. These radical white milieus facilitated the poet’s first stay in Europe. His celebration of the “international beehive of the Vieux Port” and his visits to the “Maison des gens de la mer,” after his trip to Russia (1922-1923), can thus be construed as following from his reporting on the London docks. The term “passing” also aptly refers to the publication of his poems: their being “passed on” from one magazine to another. The poems included in these radical periodicals highlight the political vein of McKay’s output yet fail to account for his own complex position: how far did he espouse the editorial lines of the magazines? Could his poetry be seen as qualifying or reinforcing these political positions?
Benoît Tadié (Université Paris-Nanterre) : « Jazz et poésie chez Claude McKay: “The Negro Dancers”»
Je propose de commenter la séquence de trois poèmes intitulée “The Negro Dancers” (« Les danseurs noirs »), parue pour la première fois dans le magazine The Liberator (juillet 1919) puis, avec quelques modifications, dans l’anthologie The New Negro d’Alain Locke (1925), où elle est rebaptisée “Harlem” et illustre une section sur le jazz. À travers cette séquence, je reviendrai sur certaines questions qui ont préoccupé les exégètes de McKay: pourquoi le choix du sonnet shakespearien pour exprimer une revendication raciale révolutionnaire, dans un contexte littéraire alors dominé par le vers libre ? Pourquoi, alors que dans Banjo (1928) l’évocation du jazz libère une expression débridée, est-elle ici associée à une forme rimée régulière, traditionnelle et contraignante? J’essaierai de montrer que, dans le contexte politique et littéraire où ces sonnets ont été composés, leur charge réside précisément dans le rapport créé entre, d’une part, l’évocation du jazz et des danseurs noirs et, d’autre part, la longue mémoire lettrée du sonnet. Reprenant celle-ci à son compte, la séquence de McKay opère un geste subversif qui s’incarne dans la fusion entre la musique syncopée du sonnet shakespearien et les mesures syncopées de la musique et de la danse noires.
Daniel Tödt (Universität Konstanz): “A Long Way from Home: Life Journey of African Maritime Workers in Interwar Marseilles”
Tracing the life journeys of black dockers and seafarers within urban and oceanic networks means analysing how they moved back and forth not only between docks and decks, continents and empires, but also between different labour fields in port cities. While documents from colonial, state and private archives provide information on the extent, recruitment, control and restriction of the mobility of African maritime workers, detailed accounts of the lives of individuals are rare. McKay’s novels “Banjo” and “Romance in Marseille” offer an experience-saturated impression of imperial Marseille as a crossroads of black workers and their stories. However, these fictionalized narratives also have blind spots. While McKay’s Marseille appears as a crossing of the Black Atlantic, readers learn little about the numerous African seamen recruited in Djibouti, for example. Based on a critical analysis of historical sources, novels and (fictionalized) autobiographies, the presentation traces routes and life journeys from colonial Africa to Marseille, which expand and complicate the image of the “picturesque proletarians from far waters” (McKay 1928).
Kerry Jane Wallart (Université d’Orléans): “Modes of Address and Performative Inclusions, in Claude McKay’s Poetry”
This paper offers a re-reading of McKay’s poetic oeuvre, from Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads (1912), written in Jamaican dialect, to Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922). While the poet’s consistent favouring of European forms, culminating in his use of the sonnet, has been seen by numerous critics as going against the more timely grain of modernist experimentation, I suggest that the modalities of address in the poems constitute a visionary intervention in terms of writerly/readerly agencies. This paper will show how the I-persona upturns the conventions of lyricism altogether, before analysing how this performative “I” also constitutes an inclusion of the addressee, or implicit reader/listener. This will lead to an investigation into notions of belonging and unbelonging in texts whose diasporic nature has tended to be obscured by claims regarding the cultural cohesion of the Harlem Renaissance.
